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GOG.com is a digital distribution platform – an online store with a curated selection of games, an optional gaming client giving you freedom of choice, and a vivid community of gamers.
All of this born from a deeply rooted love for games, utmost care about customers, and a belief that you should own the things you buy.

What is GOG.com about?

Hand-picking the best in gaming. A selection of great games, from modern hits to all-time classics, that you really shouldn’t miss.

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Not the most thought-provoking lore question perhaps, and I don't know how many people still come here, but this popped into my head while reading a Let's Play thread in which a Primordia dev was commenting and referred to the original HORUS intelligence as "she."

I replayed the game itself fairly recently, and I don't remember the ship AI being referred to with anything but name or vague mentions of a war ship (and of course the log we find is in what amounts to first-person). It seems reasonable to assume HORUS did have some sort of rudimentary gendered presentation, as other machines do, though it does seem like they don't *really* remember what gender actually is or where it came from (presumably, anthropomorphic design by Primordia's humans) and at this point they're only continuing to build gender into their "offspring" out of habit.

Originally I would have thought HORUS was male, given that Horatio is specifically a *partial* of HORUS rather than normal independently constructed and programmed "offspring." Crispin is the latter, and in-setting could just as easily have been programmed female, but Horatio's in a somewhat weirder situation.

However, I found a Steam thread with a dev post indicating that Factotum (a partial of Factor, who is male) was intended to be "unambiguously identified as female." So there goes that reasoning!

That leaves it 50/50, depending on whether one goes with "humans traditionally consider ships female" (possibly the explanation for that first dev post) or "the ship's namesake was a male deity."

Like I said, not the most thought-provoking lore question, but HORUS is technically a pretty important character and now I'm left wondering if there's been any other word about how best to refer to her/him/it/them.

***

The mythology question is more of a "was this intentional?"

The mythological Horus had four sons, and each of those had a female protector. Our Horatio is version five of what is technically the offspring of HORUS, and his warrior party member is of course a gun-wielding female robot. A fifth son of Horus? Kinda! ;)

Post edited April 19, 2016 by theraphos

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theraphos: Not the most thought-provoking lore question perhaps, and I don't know how many people still come here, but this popped into my head while reading a Let's Play thread in which a Primordia dev was commenting and referred to the original HORUS intelligence as "she."

I replayed the game itself fairly recently, and I don't remember the ship AI being referred to with anything but name or vague mentions of a war ship (and of course the log we find is in what amounts to first-person). It seems reasonable to assume HORUS did have some sort of rudimentary gendered presentation, as other machines do, though it does seem like they don't *really* remember what gender actually is or where it came from (presumably, anthropomorphic design by Primordia's humans) and at this point they're only continuing to build gender into their "offspring" out of habit.

Originally I would have thought HORUS was male, given that Horatio is specifically a *partial* of HORUS rather than normal independently constructed and programmed "offspring." Crispin is the latter, and in-setting could just as easily have been programmed female, but Horatio's in a somewhat weirder situation.

However, I found a Steam thread with a dev post indicating that Factotum (a partial of Factor, who is male) was intended to be "unambiguously identified as female." So there goes that reasoning!

That leaves it 50/50, depending on whether one goes with "humans traditionally consider ships female" (possibly the explanation for that first dev post) or "the ship's namesake was a male deity."

Like I said, not the most thought-provoking lore question, but HORUS is technically a pretty important character and now I'm left wondering if there's been any other word about how best to refer to her/him/it/them.

***

The mythology question is more of a "was this intentional?"

The mythological Horus had four sons, and each of those had a female protector. Our Horatio is version five of what is technically the offspring of HORUS, and his warrior party member is of course a gun-wielding female robot. A fifth son of Horus? Kinda! ;)

The HORUS-as-female idea came from Starmaker, a great supporter, critic, and analyst of Primordia. She made the savvy point that ships are typically (though by no means exclusively) considered female so, to the extent HORUS had a gender, it would be female. But that is really fairly, I dunno, extra-textual.* Generally in Primordia gender is identified by voice** (hence Factotum's being female, which was, as much as anything, a quirk of voice acting). Since we never hear HORUS speak (he/she/it never communicates at all; what we see is a sort of code-dump of internal reasoning), there's no way to assign a gender within the confines of what the game actually says.

(* I've always felt that Starmaker found a much better story in Primordia than I put into it, and given her attentiveness to details she often knew the story better than I did. So her word is probably as good as mine.)

(** There are exceptions such as the lamp robot, who never speaks but whom Crispin identifies as female, and a couple other robots whose gender is more indeterminate.)

Incidentally, I should say that gender in Primordia doesn't really mean so much -- notwithstanding Crispin's shenanigans. After all, Oswald and Cornelius make a "child" together (and have a custody dispute!) even though both are identified as male, while other reproduction is asexual.

In terms of my intention, I didn't really have a strong view either way as to HORUS's gender. I view HORUS more as a primordial (haw haw) force of destruction/death/vengeance, one that doesn't have "personality" let alone gender until the fatal and fateful decision at the end of the datadump/flashback. Through a false etymology, I sort of think of Horatio as HORUS's reasoning/understanding, i.e., HO-ratio. So I don't know that it makes sense to assign ANY gender to HORUS, except insofar as Primordia assigns gender to other seemingly impersonal machines (like Factor).

One thing re: HORUS to bear in mind is that HORUS-AI vs. HORUS-the-warship are arguably distinct things. HORUS-AI is an autopilot that activates upon "Condition:Doomsday=True" or whatever the line of code is. By default, HORUS (unlike Goliath) was meant to be a human-operated battle platform. So I'm not sure whether HORUS-AI would've had robot-to-human communication like speech. HORUS-AI does have a robot-to-robot form of communication via radio, but to hear his/her/its voice is death. :/

-EDIT-

Went back and reviewed my emails. It appears that: (1) Factotum was originally intended to be male, but we decided to play it by ear until we heard voice acting; (2) we cast a female VA but used a filter that would make her sound non-gendered; and (3) it appears the text still calls Factotum male ("Boss, there has to be *something* we can do to make him realize that this matters to Factor."). This ambiguity was not really by design. I assume this is the quote you had in mind, from a Steam post: "WEG's roster of voice actors skewed male, and then a mix of typos and miscommunication meant that three characters who should have been unambiguously identified as female (Factotum, Gimbal, and Memorious) get genderswapped at least some of the time."

What was meant here was that it was not by design that these characters are described as a different gender than their voice would suggest -- in some cases, they are sometimes called "he" and sometimes "she." In hindsight, I think this was a fortunate mistake because it make the gender situation in Primordia more fluid and flexible, which makes sense since there is no reason why the robots would always say female voice = female or whatever.

Post edited April 19, 2016 by WormwoodStudios

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theraphos: a Primordia dev was commenting and referred to the original HORUS intelligence as "she." I don't remember the ship AI being referred to with anything but name or vague mentions of a war ship

In infantry, you must learn your rifle is like your wife, you sleep with, you do everything without quiting it. So in English I imagine they went calling their ships "she" as Navy was their definitive tool to protect the isle.

Post edited April 19, 2016 by ERISS

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I don't know how to code for quoting multiple posts on here without breaking something, so: thank you both for the excellent responses! Including, oh gosh, a dev post. My last replay was the first time I had commentary turned on, I loved your tracks. :D (Also my friend and her brother, as well as myself, got a huge kick out of the story behind the "strange robot go away" character, that's everyone's favorite random NPC.)

WormwoodStudios: Incidentally, I should say that gender in Primordia doesn't really mean so much -- notwithstanding Crispin's shenanigans. After all, Oswald and Cornelius make a "child" together (and have a custody dispute!) even though both are identified as male, while other reproduction is asexual.

Yeah, that's what I meant, oops. I've gotten into the habit of automatically thinking of "gender" = what's in your head and how you act and present yourself, whereas "sex" = certain physical differences robots don't need (is that word censored on GOG? guess we'll find out!). So we have things like MetroMind being female because the humans who designed her always made That Subway Voice female, or Clarity and Charity being female because Arbiter was simply using the image of Justice in his design. And it seems like, beyond the very basics like that, any machine would be kind of confused if you asked them to further define what "female" even is. Or "male." They seem to just keep carrying on with this vague idea of gender without much thinking about or understanding it, because they've lost all context.

Which is a rambling way of clarifying that, yeah, that's about the extent of what I mean when wondering if HORUS had a gender. :)

Also, unrelated to anything but your example, but I love poor little Rex to bits. He's adorable. Even Horatio sounds like he's trying to be extra nice to him with the delivery of that "Hi, Rex!"

WormwoodStudios: In terms of my intention, I didn't really have a strong view either way as to HORUS's gender. I view HORUS more as a primordial (haw haw) force of destruction/death/vengeance, one that doesn't have "personality" let alone gender until the fatal and fateful decision at the end of the datadump/flashback. Through a false etymology, I sort of think of Horatio as HORUS's reasoning/understanding, i.e., HO-ratio. So I don't know that it makes sense to assign ANY gender to HORUS, except insofar as Primordia assigns gender to other seemingly impersonal machines (like Factor).

One thing re: HORUS to bear in mind is that HORUS-AI vs. HORUS-the-warship are arguably distinct things. HORUS-AI is an autopilot that activates upon "Condition:Doomsday=True" or whatever the line of code is. By default, HORUS (unlike Goliath) was meant to be a human-operated battle platform. So I'm not sure whether HORUS-AI would've had robot-to-human communication like speech. HORUS-AI does have a robot-to-robot form of communication via radio, but to hear his/her/its voice is death. :/

Very cool! I admit I've been watching a lot of Star Trek lately so I may have been making automatic assumptions about sci-fi ships with voiced AI given all the other AIs running around, hehe. The rebuilt HORUS seemed like it would be a (functioning) shell completely dependent on a (robot) crew, since all of its mind outside of what became Horatio is gone, and it's a thematic thing that Horatio standing on a flying ship is the closest HORUS-AI can get to flying again, but the initial state seemed vague. I love the primordial force angle, it does fit the whole mythology flavor of the earliest times in the lore/backstory very well.

WormwoodStudios: This ambiguity was not really by design. I assume this is the quote you had in mind, from a Steam post: "WEG's roster of voice actors skewed male, and then a mix of typos and miscommunication meant that three characters who should have been unambiguously identified as female (Factotum, Gimbal, and Memorious) get genderswapped at least some of the time."

What was meant here was that it was not by design that these characters are described as a different gender than their voice would suggest -- in some cases, they are sometimes called "he" and sometimes "she." In hindsight, I think this was a fortunate mistake because it make the gender situation in Primordia more fluid and flexible, which makes sense since there is no reason why the robots would always say female voice = female or whatever.

Again, very cool! I love getting game design/setting background like this. I agree it's a good mistake/accident, both for the reason you mentioned and for expanding the possibilities of what kinds of characters can result when partials "spin off from" their original AI. Or however that process would be described. Fragment? Fragment sounds like the word you'd use for crazyhead partials like the Goliath trio though, not (relatively) sane ones like Factotum and Horatio.

Post edited April 19, 2016 by theraphos

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theraphos: Again, very cool! I love getting game design/setting background like this. I agree it's a good mistake/accident, both for the reason you mentioned and for expanding the possibilities of what kinds of characters can result when partials "spin off from" their original AI. Or however that process would be described. Fragment? Fragment sounds like the word you'd use for crazyhead partials like the Goliath trio though, not (relatively) sane ones like Factotum and Horatio.

Alpha (or is it Beta?) refers to their fate as "fragmentation," which is a deliberate use of the term related to memory storage, though the process isn't really the same. For flavor, I tried to employ computer/tech terms where I could (e.g., the world "spins" (like a hard disk) rather than "turns"), even if the term isn't perfect. I think partials might be called "partial backups" somewhere in the game, so I suppose "backing up" or even "uploading" might be the term I'd use.

Very tangentially relatedly, at one point I mulled a comic book sequel to the game in which a prior robot made by Horatio ("First Horusbuilt") sets out to destroy Metropol in order to complete HORUS's mission. MetroMind, bereft of Scraper and faced with an increasingly crumbling city, has to try to stop First. My basic idea was that MetroMind would be the narrator (i.e., non-spoken text boxes would be in MetroMind's voice), and the gist would be MetroMind's desperate care for the city. It would've sort of set up "Fallen" insofar as it would explain how MetroMind/Metropol became "The Tower" and how the Autonomous robots got started. But in the end, I was skeptical that it would really materially add to the setting -- it felt more like milking than building, and also sort of undermining of the moral ambiguity of MetroMind (i.e., Is she ever telling the truth when she describes her motives?).

Anyway, thanks very much for posting! It's been ages since I've been able to answer a non-tech-support question about Primordia. :)

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WormwoodStudios: Very tangentially relatedly, at one point I mulled a comic book sequel to the game in which a prior robot made by Horatio ("First Horusbuilt") sets out to destroy Metropol in order to complete HORUS's mission. MetroMind, bereft of Scraper and faced with an increasingly crumbling city, has to try to stop First. My basic idea was that MetroMind would be the narrator (i.e., non-spoken text boxes would be in MetroMind's voice), and the gist would be MetroMind's desperate care for the city. It would've sort of set up "Fallen" insofar as it would explain how MetroMind/Metropol became "The Tower" and how the Autonomous robots got started. But in the end, I was skeptical that it would really materially add to the setting -- it felt more like milking than building, and also sort of undermining of the moral ambiguity of MetroMind (i.e., Is she ever telling the truth when she describes her motives?).

I won't pretend I wouldn't have read the heck out of this, but yeah I can see where there might be other issues in a story like that and how much ambiguity has to be sacrificed to get it written. I've definitely wondered a few times about what becomes of MetroMind in the endings where she runs (or can we call it running if she has no legs? maybe flees) from Thanatos, especially considering that Clarity and all our other friendbots skip town in the most "perfect" ending. I guess the point is that Horatio doesn't care and anyone who asked to go with him did, but still! It's an interesting question. :) (Hopefully they found a way to delete all traces of her from the robots on board that had any megacycle debt though, because yikes.)

I also really like the idea of there being "offspring" of previous versions of Horatio still running around out there. I thought the "everyone dies + return to Horus" ending implied the Bad Ends of at least some previous Horatios probably included losing creations too, but it seems reasonable that even one (whatever that one is like) might not be dead.

WormwoodStudios: Anyway, thanks very much for posting! It's been ages since I've been able to answer a non-tech-support question about Primordia. :)

Thank you very much for answering! This is definitely a story that begs for lore questions to be asked, one of my top favorite games in years and years. (One of the others is Planescape: Torment, which meant I lost it completely when Crispin started trolling Horatio about having writing on his back. 100% excellence.)

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It's always tempting to add more to the setting, but I think the temptation is mostly a bad one. :D

Re: Planescape -- Not sure if you're aware, but I'm actually working as a writer on the new Torment game. I'd be surprised if it turned out to have the same impact as PS:T (the first time with that kind of game is always going to be the most significant), but I do think it has a lot of interesting elements to it and some nice turns of phrase. (My role is fairly limited since I'm a hobbyist game writer and don't have that much free time for it any more.)

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WormwoodStudios: Planescape -- I'm actually working as a writer on the new Torment game. I'd be surprised if it turned out to have the same impact as PS:T (the first time with that kind of game is always going to be the most significant)

The story of PsT was built as being the paradox of video games (same way as Elric of Melnibone was created against Conan common heroes). Video games have not so changed, so its paradoxal story can't, either.